From CPO to CEO: Dealing with Pricing, Revenue, Leadership, and OKRs – Jonathan Landau (CEO @Movu)

In this episode, we welcome Jonathan Landau, CEO of Movu, to share his transition journey from CPO to CEO. It’s a deep dive into the challenges and opportunities that come with moving from a product-centric role to the helm of a company.

Movu is the leading Swiss Marketplace for moving services.

Jonathan guides us through the complexities of pricing in a marketplace that demands buyer and seller satisfaction. He sheds light on the importance of understanding not just the lowest price, but the value each party is looking for. The conversation then pivots to customer retention, emphasizing how vital it is to listen to feedback and how it can significantly impact your business’s success or failure.

But that’s not all. Jonathan offers invaluable insights on effective communication with your team and customers, the lessons in leadership learned from managing products, and the critical role of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in steering a company toward its strategic goals.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone aspiring to evolve professionally from a product or leadership position into a CEO or general management role. Don’t miss out on these lessons from the front lines of business leadership. 

Transcript:

Salva (00:01.141)
Hello and welcome to Reasonable Product. Today I invited Jonathan Landau with me. Hi, Jonathan. How are you? Excellent. Very nice to have you today. Jonathan, you’re CEO of .. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and about what . is doing?

Jonathan (00:08.34)
Hi Salva, how are you? I’m great, thanks.

Jonathan (00:22.294)
Well, I have been CEO of Movu, like you said, for just over a year now. And I come from a product background, so I have quite varied experience in different types of products and different sizes of companies. I worked for Tutti.ch, which your Swiss listeners will hopefully know is a sort of a generalist digital marketplace. I also worked for the media industry most recently. At the end, I said…

and a few other places here and there. Most of my career I’ve been working in different product roles and yeah for the last year. I’ve been at . as CEO responsible for the whole thing.
Movu is a marketplace where people who need to move can find moving companies and cleaning companies and we connect the two sides.

Salva (01:57.433)
And I’m really going to go very deep on this one because we were going to dedicate a full section of this podcast to talking about Mova’s business model and pricing, of course. One of the reasons why I was extremely happy to have you today, Jonathan, is because you said it already, but you did the very the largest part of your career in product. And now you somehow transition to a CEO or to a to a more business or general management role. So.

Jonathan (02:00.386)
contestant.

Salva (02:25.745)
I would like to dedicate also part of our discussion to understand a little bit more about why did it and how it was.

Jonathan (02:31.958)
Fantastic. Awesome. Happy to talk about that.

Salva (02:33.221)
So first of all, do you regret it one year after?

Jonathan (02:37.078)
No, I don’t. I don’t. I don’t regret the first part of my career, the product part at all. And I also don’t regret making the jump over to sort of general management. I think there’s a good case you can make for being a product as a great preparation for a general management role. That’s certainly how I found it. And, you know, there’s this…

infamous, much maligned description of the PM as the CEO of the product, that I think has come a little bit out of fashion, maybe rightly so. And certainly as CEO, I would say the CEO is the CEO of anything. But at the same time, I think being a product manager,

With the soft skills that you are kind of forced to develop, with the responsibility as sort of an informal leader of a group of different specialists to help everybody come together and achieve a common goal, and with the need to sort of have a strategic view over the full company, what is good for the business, what is good for users, and what is feasible in terms of what can be built.

That obviously is a great preparation for this type of role, certainly in a digital company, but I would say in any type of company, big or small.

Salva (04:00.433)
So did you find like a natural path and you said, you know, everything was going in this direction then an opportunity opened and you’re ready to jump on it? Or did you still feel like, oh, this is a pivot in my career?

Jonathan (04:13.962)
I mean, it certainly was for the reason that when you move up the traditional career ladder, let’s say in product, you move from maybe specialist, more functional task into more of a strategic view, you also get maybe.

team leadership, so you start being responsible also for developing other people and their skills. But you sort of broaden your horizons still within that lane, which was the product lane for me. So in a way, you’re ready to jump to an even broader remit and even broader view of things. At the same time, certainly what I see in my role right now is that you also have to jump back into the details.

of other functions because there’s always something going on, multiple things at the same time usually, and then you have to jump back in to specifics and details of functions and departments and roles that you have never actually worked in. So that is certainly, you could call it a pivot in my case, and also a fantastic learning opportunity, right?

Salva (05:30.757)
Do you have the feeling it creates kind of a Stockholm syndrome where, you know, you know, I’ve got the overall view of the company and I think you have to try as much as possible to be objective and to be the godfather of the full company, but in reality, you still might feel you’ve got a little preference or at least a different way of approaching product. Is it something real?

Jonathan (05:54.114)
You know, I’m… Certainly, having the familiarity with the role and with the product as a way of thinking as well, there’s a bias there. I mean, it’s just what you’ve been, what you’re familiar with and all that. I think it cuts both ways. So you can also be more skeptical and more maybe critical.

of the people working in product than of others, because you simply don’t have as much experience. Seeing the difference between very good and fantastic, excellent product people in other roles. In my case, I found it to be a lot of fun to dive into other topics. And I’ve luckily also found that I’ve not been as involved in product as maybe I would have thought or maybe as you know.

people would have feared with my background on the one hand, because there’s a strong team already around. And certainly, I’m very sorry. I trust these guys to know what they’re doing and they do. And at the same time, you know, MoVu has a…

Jonathan (07:15.39)
a different view of product than some of the other companies that I’ve worked at. We can get into that also in terms of the actual business model, in terms of where we are as a company. So that’s been maybe a bit of a natural barrier to me getting too involved or more involved than I should.

Salva (07:33.581)
Tell us more about this. I mean, what is the product and move? What do you call product and move?

Jonathan (07:39.15)
Yeah, I mean, I think this has evolved over time. So if you look at it very simply at MoVu, as I said, we’re a marketplace and we are here. Our USB in a way is really the matching the right companies and people from both sides of the marketplace, right? Our…

People who need to move are aware generally that there is such a thing as moving companies and moving companies know that there are people somewhere out there in Switzerland in our case that want to move. But providing the value in getting users to understand what are the good moving companies in Switzerland because there are many of them, which ones can provide high quality, are rated highly, have good prices. Also, what is the…

comparison between different prices and why. On the one hand, and on the other hand, getting a really, the maximum amount of information for a moving company to know what is this inquiry about? What do I need to actually provide? Can I provide it? When can I provide it? And also in a standardized way, right? That’s the actual sort of matching technology, if you will, that MoVu provides.

This, as I said, that evolved over time. So as far as I understand it, Movu, which is turning 10 this year, started as a pretty simple lead platform, right? So you enter your details, I wanna move, this is my date, and it goes out to a bunch of companies and they sell you or they send you offers. And that was the sort of simplistic product at the beginning. And over time, if you split Movu into the sort of the marketing part, which is where we acquire and attract

the actual digital product, which is when you go through a flow saying, okay, this is what I need all the way to send off the inquiry and show me the offers. And then the actual moving consulting, I would say, is where we talk to customers usually on the phone. And we try to explain what the different offers are.

Jonathan (09:57.034)
then the product is what I call the digital product, the form in a way. And so this, you know, it evolved from a one-step click to say, I want leads or I want offers, into a fairly long and very well A-B tested inquiry form that provides all the information that our moving companies need to actually set their own prices, which is a topic I’m sure we’ll also get to later.

So that’s already a more complex product. And here the goal is to move people from the top to the bottom of the funnel, and get as many of them through as possible with high conversion, while also getting the maximum amount of information. If you take it one step further, and I think this is where we should take it, the whole thing is obviously the product, right? The whole experience is a product. In fact, moving.

Jonathan (10:55.698)
is a fairly long journey that starts long before anybody ever thinks of MoVu or accesses MoVu when you are at home and you maybe think, you know, I really want to move into a different place. And it ends when you have your feet up on the couch in your new apartment or your new house and you’re happy, right? And within that journey, you know, what MoVu provides comprehensively and holistically is that entire product. And I think what MoVu has been successful at doing is bringing that kind of product thinking.

from the marketing, from sort of an optimized data driven and quite mature marketing operation to acquire the customers in the moment where they need us. All the way to talking on the phone, giving our customers all the information and additional sort of context that they need. And then of course, finally, the actual physical moving, which is neither digital nor

in any way controlled in the end by us. So it’s indirectly controlled. But thinking of it as sort of an entire product experience and bringing those kinds of customer-centric approaches to the whole thing, that is, in short, the short version of my long answer, that’s the product.

Salva (12:16.005)
Do you understand correctly that there is a part which is kind of the basic, right? Let’s say the form or basically the marketing part where you acquire the leads and that’s table stake. And this was probably enough 10 years ago when the company started. But today what I’m hearing is the product, it starts there, but actually it goes with you throughout the full journey until the moment, as you said, you are with your feet on the couch in the new apartment, right?

Jonathan (12:39.15)
Yeah, indeed, indeed. And I think, you know, you say that was enough at the time. I’m not sure it was, right? It was how it started. And I think the realization very quickly was that is actually not enough. So for users or customers, the experience was one of, yeah, sure, it’s very fast and easy to fill out a form. If it doesn’t have too many details on it and I don’t have to go and double check how many windows I have or think about how many boxes I need to be moved.

But the quality of the offers that you receive is, you know, corresponds to that, right? So the work and the actual complexity that we are trying to solve was actually unsolved. So users still have to talk to moving companies. Sure, they could send off one form and get a lot of offers in return, but the work of digging through those offers and understanding why is this one cheaper or actually they don’t.

They don’t understand what I actually need. So I need to renegotiate or find another offer that was not very helpful. And crucially, also on the other side of the market, right? There are moving companies and there are different businesses who still do that, that are happy to just receive names and phone numbers and then do the rest themselves. What we offer now is a much more evolved form of that where you get.

again, a standardized and very sort of data rich set of information for every inquiry. And when I say standardized, it’s also we have a CRM for moving companies, basically, where they receive those inquiries, they make their offers there. And so we provide them much more than just the data or the information, but really the tools. And obviously, we take care of quite a big chunk of the

of the work that they might not be specialized in, right? So customer acquisition, customer care, talking to customers and explaining things. That’s the value that we bring to the other side of the market.

Salva (14:44.909)
So from what you’re saying, I would suspect and tell me if it’s correct, that if you just limit yourself to getting these leads and you don’t do this work of consulting, basically helping people understand what is important, what’s not important, you’re somehow forcing people to compare purely on price the offers. Is it something is it true or?

Jonathan (15:05.898)
That is true, right? Or to find out if they do have other factors that they rate highly, such as the quality of the service or maybe the location of the moving company. How far does this moving truck actually have to travel to get to my place? I’m sure there are ways to find out, but it’s not something that kind of service can offer. And obviously, pricing is important. And I think…

price is important. So it’s not like we could somehow replace the natural tendency to try to go for the lowest possible price. And we don’t want to do that either. But it is giving a more, a fuller context. And in the context of moving, which is a, you know, I called it a journey before, and I sort of, you can romanticize it, but it’s generally a frustrating thing. It’s not a thing that you want to do. It comes.

embedded in hopefully a very positive experience of, you know, your finding and moving into your dream house, but it’s not the part of it that is most exciting for most people. So I think there is a need to add other factors beyond price to the decision-making process, and that’s what we do.

Salva (16:20.273)
to decommoditizing something which could be a commodity if you just start comparing different offers and quotes you may have from 10 companies yourself.

Jonathan (16:28.234)
Yeah. And again, also, I mean, those quotes, you still have to get them, right? So you have to go out and find people. And there’s also so that in a way, there’s an element of us opening up to a broad set of potential providers by connecting people to our partner network. But in other sense, there’s also a limitation on the choice that we put by actually having a smaller set of partners.

Salva (16:32.625)
Thanks, guys.

Jonathan (16:59.435)
than we could have. We guarantee high quality, we know these companies, we work with them, and we have worked with many of them for many, many years. So it also takes away a little bit of that complexity because once you go in and say, I want to find the best price, you have to go, if you’re serious about that, even in a country as small as Switzerland, you’ll have to talk to a lot of companies and get a lot of offers. So at some point, we can sort of…

find the sweet spot between a choice and a good overview of what’s out there.

Salva (17:30.657)
And so just to be clear about the business model, you don’t make money. So you don’t charge directly people moving, right? You make your life out of commissions coming from the other side. Is it so?

Jonathan (17:42.194)
That’s right. So customers don’t pay any premium on actually using mobile. We do.

charge for the work that we do for the moving companies, which I mentioned before, right? So all these aspects of acquisition and contact with customers and customer care and coordination, obviously that is work that we do and that is valuable. And that’s how we make money.

Salva (18:16.901)
So basically a commission, so if I understand correctly, there are basically two elements of pricing here. One is me as a consumer, I have to move and the price I’m gonna look at is the price of the full moving. So it’s gonna be the price of the service itself, which you can’t really influence really, is it? Is the price coming from your providers, I guess.

Jonathan (18:35.71)
Yes, yes it is. And that’s also a, I think a USB on the provider side or that we offer to the providers that as far as I know, to the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t really exist in other markets or in Switzerland in this type of platform, right? So we allow full pricing control to our providers.

Salva (18:59.845)
Got you. So you give them the data. You’re saying you give enriched leads. I don’t remember how you call them, but you give them all the context about the leads, but eventually they’re making the final price and you’re just carrying over this price to the end user. But so I guess this is also an element of complexity for you because eventually you cannot really choose the price. And what the customer wants is to pay a certain service, which you’re not providing yourself. Is it so?

Jonathan (19:05.258)
Yeah.

Jonathan (19:11.51)
Yeah, that’s right.

That’s right.

Jonathan (19:27.782)
That is correct. That is a complexity. I think the alternative which some competitors use is obviously to use with the data that they have available to set their own prices, right? And then to go back to the providers and basically sell the service that has already been booked for a lower price ideally so that they can make money like that, which is a different kind of business model. In our experience

Having the kind of relationship, deep relationship with the moving companies that will allow them to, you know, to determine their own pricing and sort of be in charge and control of their own destiny in that sense has resulted in a better and longer relationship that we have with the providers.

Salva (20:18.245)
So what you’re thinking about the other providers is that they basically, let’s say the Movu equivalent, the platform, they would know how much they have to price for a given service. They say, I sell this package, let’s say for 1000 francs. And then they go back to the moving companies and say, who can do this for 1000 francs? Is it something like this? Or for another, ideally, if they want to survive.

Jonathan (20:38.074)
Or maybe who can do this for 800 bucks? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yes, and we could do the same thing, right? I mean, we have plenty of data. We have, over what is almost 10 years and certainly over the last couple of years, we have all the data we need to set prices if we wanted to do that. And in a way we do that as well by just, we have a…

sort of an expected price on every inquiry, which we only use to make sure that if somebody offers sort of in the free marketplace within our provider community, if any one of the providers offers a price that is dramatically higher or lower than what we would expect, we sort of stop that and make sure and double check. That’s all we do. So there’s obviously alternatives in this type of business model.

And again, coming back to product, for having this type of relationship with providers, we have found that this is the best model for us and has also allowed us to be quite successful. That is the only relationship with customers that . actually has that lives over a longer period and is quite a intense relationship, or that’s the wrong word.

But if we have a relationship with people who move, it’s one that is quite irregular. And the regular relationship we have is with the moving companies.

Salva (22:13.425)
How often people move usually? I listen to Switzerland.

Jonathan (22:16.418)
So there’s data that we have that basically the typical average household moves once every 10 years in Switzerland. So you could sort of, there’s two ways of seeing that. There’s the optimistic way, the glass half full way, which is that 10% of households, which is a significant number of people move every year, and those are all potential customers for us. The other side is that obviously once they have moved, it’s on average 10 years until they move again.

which creates one of the core sort of challenges of the business model of MoVu, which we can also talk about, right? So it’s fairly high transactional costs that we have, mainly to acquire customers, because people are not generally looking for moving unless they are actually moving. So we need to find them at that moment, bring them into the platform and hopefully create a fantastic experience.

And if in doing so, we have sort of done all we can in that moment, at least in this limited view of it’s just about to move. Right. Yeah. So then we go to the next customer, right. So we need to pay again.

Salva (23:31.261)
But that’s what I’m trying to say. I understand why it’s hard. I understand that you have to pay every time. So you don’t basically don’t have retention on the customer side because 10 years is way too far. But isn’t it also an advantage for you because this is an issue you have, but it’s an issue that your potential providers would also have. And you’re in a much better position to optimize on this part of the journey than they would be individually.

Jonathan (23:54.314)
Yeah, that’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. I mean, you know, I always say that is the challenge of the business model of MoVu. And at the same time, it is the reason MoVu can exist. If everybody moved all the time, you know, like you have your hairdresser, you have your moving company, you know who it is, you trust them, you don’t need anybody to connect you to a moving company. Given that is an infrequent thing and also a frustrating thing that you don’t necessarily wanna deal with, that’s where we come in.

And of course, the same is true for our partner companies, our providers who do not have that expertise because they focus on their part of the business. So that is indeed what allows us to exist in the first place and optimizing that, optimizing for making sure that in the end we keep more money than we spend. Obviously that is a path to success for Movu. And I should say that-

The average might be 10 years, but obviously we have an ever growing number of users that come in that are returning customers. We are hitting that 10 year mark, but it’s been true for the last couple of years. That number is rising quite nicely. Ideally, obviously, those are people who have some kind of association with Movu, who remember our brand, who remember that we are the ones that help them have a smooth, relaxed, easy relocation.

and then they will come back to us without having to go through our good friends at Google.

Salva (25:26.853)
But I think this also underlines a very important point. If you look at this from the product perspective, it’s very easy to say an average, and it was my fault. I asked the question in the first place. It was my fault, but an average of 10 years, but this doesn’t really tell you the truth because beyond this average of 10 years, for one person who never changes his house during his or her life, there are potentially 10 people changing every year.

Jonathan (25:34.983)
Mm-mm-mm.

Jonathan (25:52.246)
Yeah, that’s correct. One of the challenges is to stay relevant for those people, different people in different stages of their lives. It tends to be the case that people who move often are not exactly the same people that are willing to pay a lot of money for moving. Generally speaking, younger students, people maybe moving around a few times during their 20s, maybe early 30s.

But at the same time, right? I mean, those are, like you said, those are averages. There are always those that we can find and we’re always looking for ways to provide services and interactions beyond just that one time move so that we can sort of, there’s a compound growth into the future of people who know Movu and have worked with Movu, have used Movu in the past.

Salva (26:50.161)
So if you look at this with the eyes of the CEO who has been a former product person, which kind of goals of North Star do you try to give to your team so that they don’t forget everything that you just said and they don’t get into the trap of saying, you know, my customers are not loyal by definition, my users, because they’re going to be here in 10 years, but my providers are because I work with them every day. So this is the usual question about two-side marketplaces. How do you ensure you…

don’t favor one side to the other. And how do you pass over this message to the teams through KPIs?

Jonathan (27:25.034)
I mean, so to the first question, obviously, we have that relationship with the moving companies and it’s an important one. It’s a long-term one. And at the same time,

Jonathan (27:40.53)
it’s one where there’s, I think, a sort of guaranteed mutual interest on both sides to provide a certain kind of service, right? Because in the end, I mean, the path to, you know, whatever retention we can achieve on the user side, on the customer side, and high ratings and all that is through high quality, right? Which again, coming back to what we said before, is the thing that we can provide sort of

in a guaranteed way that you cannot get otherwise. And how do we achieve high quality? Obviously, we work with the right partners and we try to select the right kind of partners, but we also have a carrot and stick situation going on here as well, because moving companies have an incentive to stay with us and to constantly prove to us that they are providing that kind of service.

And like I said before, we have, we limit the number of partners that we have. So there are more moving companies that want to work with mobile, then we actually have on the platform. And that is for a good reason. First of all, you know, we want to be selective for the reasons I mentioned before, but also the fewer partners we have, as long as we can actually provide all the services we need, the more.

Jonathan (29:07.966)
the happier the individual providers will be. So that’s on the provider side, what we can do to ensure a good high quality service. On the KPI question, obviously we have ways of tracking the happiness and how happy people are with our service. And we really built that into the product itself. So there’s a rating tool on MoVu that will allow you to rate individual companies.

as well as radars. And that is something that has actually been quite important to me, maybe also coming from a product background, to not allow us to even think that, well, this user is not coming back anyway, so let’s just do whatever we can to sell. It’s a process. But certainly one that I think now going into a second decade of MoVu, that will be the difference between long-term success and not.

Salva (30:06.305)
And when you’re talking about, so basically your relationship with your providers and the way I’m understanding it is a On one hand is better to create some, I don’t want to say scarcity because it might come across as negative but more selection. So better to have few qualitative providers and not spreading too thin. So they also have got meaningful business with us, right? But on the other side, you left to charge them for your service. How do you…

Jonathan (30:18.055)
Mm.

Jonathan (30:28.555)
That’s right.

Salva (30:34.877)
do you come up with the prices or the commission which eventually is the same for them? What is the kind of reasoning, the kind of strategy which is behind that?

Jonathan (30:48.19)
You know, we’re convinced that the commission that we charge, that it covers basically the service that we provide, right? Which I mentioned before, it’s all the interactions with the customers before they become customers, once they are customers, and obviously after the fact, if there’s any interaction, negative or positive that’s needed, it goes through us, right?

Jonathan (31:16.918)
The proof is in the pudding, in a way. The proof is in how many providers continue to be willing to work with us. And we’re also quite aware that we don’t want to create any dependency that turns into something negative. So we offer, and we also make sure that our providers

use the CRM that I mentioned, which we actually built and we continue to build. It’s part of our product portfolio for them, that they use it also for other types of business. So for their own private customers that they acquire and that they do that, which allows us to have a healthy relationship. Yes, we want them to be willing to work with us and to offer on the inquiries that come in.

We don’t want to create a relationship where they’re purely dependent on us.

Salva (32:19.325)
And sorry, and so you mentioned the CRM. So this is a second product you sell them, right? And it’s something they pay for. Okay, so it’s really like two different offerings. And one you say here is the CRM if you want to become more organized in the way you manage your customers. And secondly, you sell them, let’s say, the closed leads basically.

Jonathan (32:23.126)
That’s right.

They do.

Jonathan (32:39.282)
That’s right. So that goes both into the same system. I will say that, you know, on the list of on the long to do list of what Mova could do, really going out there and selling the CRM to any moving company and all of them in Switzerland or, you know, actually anywhere. It’s on the list. It’s not something that we’ve invested in heavily. Right. So while we do have customers coming in and using the CRM, and it’s called Bixin.

using Pixin on their own without being part of the Movu network. You know, it’s more… At the moment, it’s mostly tailored to actual usage on Movu plus all the additional work that you might have. But in terms of what kind of product it is, and also the needs to understand your customers…

It’s obviously very different building a digital website from a CRM tool that is used by businesses.

Salva (33:43.997)
So implied in your answer was when you said our prices basically are fair, that’s what you’re saying, right? They cover what you’re doing, but you don’t have the feeling you’re squeezing them too much. So this is really going to the direction of kind of value-based pricing. You’ve got the impression you’re covering which part of the process. So because they come with you, they probably can… They don’t have to do something on their own, is it so?

Jonathan (33:53.171)
Mm.

Jonathan (34:06.842)
That’s it. Yeah. I mean, if you really think about it from, you know, if I can try to describe the customer experience of a moving company, you wake up in the morning, you log into Bixin, and you see the inquiries that have come in, right? So you have details of in what region, who wants to move this size of apartment from where to where, at which date. You have a calendar functionality. You have all those tools that you need to find out.

Should I, can I make an offer? And then you set your price, right?

Jonathan (34:43.523)
and you know.

Yeah, customer acquisition, having the freedom to set your own price, having the freedom to offer as many or as few as you want, right? So if our partner companies have busier months where they have their own clients or they have maybe one big client that they need to work on for a full week, nobody’s forcing them to make offers on any inquiry. And then there is a coordination aspect. So beyond simple customer care where it’s like, oh, I still need to…

pay my bill, but I lost the invoice or anything like that. The customers can also call and say, hey, I need the moving company to come one hour later because actually I need to do this and that. Then we take care of that coordination. So that is again, additional cost that the company does not have. And I think there’s a very easy metric to find out whether the commission is correct or not. And that is where the companies are sort of

in any way verbalizing or communicating this or leaving the platform. And obviously, in theory at least, higher commissions will lead to higher prices on the platform. So that’s the other side of the equation that we need to make sure that we don’t tip the balance either way. So obviously we want to continue to be successful, but at the same time, if everything’s too expensive…

Again, we’re sort of nullifying the reason why people would go to mobile.

Salva (36:18.085)
That’s a very good point. So basically you’re saying if you charge too much on the provider, eventually they will have to charge it back to your customers. And so you do have in reality kind of an influence on the end price. I mean, not a total one, but you could have everything screened up because you charged much on the provider eventually.

Jonathan (36:35.158)
That’s right. So it’s a delicate dance in a way. But you know, not one that I’m worried about too much, but also because we’re not going crazy on this. We’re really focused on providing the service. And as long as inquiries come in, offers are made, people book their moves, and it all works out at the end of the month. We’re happy. So…

Salva (36:38.789)
Completely, yeah.

Jonathan (37:05.254)
We can talk about this, but there’s obviously in this journey of the moving experience, it is absolutely true that the most lucrative or the highest frank amount part of it is the actual move, is booking your move with maybe the exception of actually buying a house or an apartment. And yes, adding a percentage point here or there,

can obviously increase your margins. At the same time, if you think of it as a journey, I think if we are going to continue to grow and optimize our business, which obviously we’re trying to do all the time, there are many, many touch points outside of the actual move that we can either offer or facilitate. And so that’s certainly an area where we can look, that we can look at first before we go

squeeze even more out of what is actually a very good and very healthy relationship.

Salva (38:09.833)
So that’s a very good point. So if you look at this broadly, not only about the price you’re charging today, where do you see the growing of MoVu? It’s going to be more on, you probably kind of ruled out of the squeezing more your current customers. It’s going to be going broader in this journey of the customer. You’re going to deeper. You were talking, for example, SaaS kind of business with the CRM. Where do you see the right access?

Jonathan (38:22.433)
and that’s it.

Jonathan (38:34.81)
Like I said, it’s a journey and there are different needs and requirements that different people have along that journey. Understanding what those are, I think that’s a big low-hanging fruit that we still have. Obviously, now in 2024, you have a lot of players on the market that offer all these tangential services, some exclusively and some also as part of a broad set of services.

Whether it’s, you know, I don’t know, painters or gardening or electricians, handicrafts, all those kinds of services that obviously at a certain point in a move, you are likely to need. There’s also beyond that, the types of services that people also have a need for, like changing their internet provider, maybe if they move into new house.

insurance obviously is a big question and we are I should say owned by an insurance company. So those are the sort of needs that in certain cases as a platform that caters to people who move we know people will need maybe before other people do. So what can we do with that? That is sort of the broadening of the funnel in a way or the sort of further monetizing that entire journey.

Jonathan (40:01.022)
So that’s one side. The other side, I think, is also that there’s still potential. We know that we do not have that full market that I mentioned. We do not have that full 10% of Swiss households every year on Volvo. That’s something we’re very aware of. How do we grow that? And here, there are also companies or organizations or institutions that know when people are moving before we do. Right?

And you can think of different types of institutions there. So how can we get relationship with those organizations that will A, build more market share for us because we may be reaching people who naturally would not go to the channels that we usually acquire users from, which is to a large degree, Google and other search engines. And at the same time, we build a relationship with those. We actually start to solve or mitigate one of that or that key challenge.

of having non-recurring users and single-time high transaction costs. So that’s another area where we can take our existing business model that works very well and expand it to offer a broader set of services to a broader set of people.

Salva (41:17.805)
So I understand it’s not easy, right? Because you’re still working on relatively thin margins because it looks like it’s pure margin, but in reality, you’ve got a lot of acquisition costs. You still spend a lot of time, yes, as a digital platform, but you’re saying you spend a lot of human time with those people to help them choose the provider and I guess also going together hand in hand with the provider. So the work to be done there is tough. Now, the question is, Movu is not huge, like in terms of people headcount,

Jonathan (41:32.799)
Yeah.

Salva (41:47.545)
What is that, like 100 employees roughly or more?

Jonathan (41:50.962)
No, no, we just have about 35. Yeah.

Salva (41:53.957)
35 employees. And with 35 employees, how do you manage to communicate this direction without entering into their daily job? So now that you have experienced both sides, from a CEO perspective, from a product people perspective, how do you infuse this direction you like to get as a CEO without getting into the temptation of saying, I know what to do? That’s what I’d like to try next.

Jonathan (42:22.206)
I mean, they’re sort of straightforward tools of strategic communication and defining a strategy and really zeroing in on a few key things. I mentioned some of them in my previous answer.

Jonathan (42:38.21)
describing and visualizing them in a way that is very close to the actual work that people do. That’s basically it. I think the business model itself and the work that we do at Movu, my role, which is what it is because of where Movu is at, is not to reinvent the business model, it’s not to completely reinvent it.

the company or the way we do things, but to sort of set the direction and then optimize. Right. I think it’s a very different challenge from maybe similar sized companies, CEOs, who are still massively growing or trying to figure out the business model. That’s a job that was, you know, the CEO’s job a few years ago. And so in that sense, I think strategic clarity and strategic direction is key.

One of the challenges that I have found is indeed with a company the size of ours and with people generally not having too much time on their hands outside of their daily business is to sort of have that constant improvement and optimization and also innovation, right? So I’m talking about optimization, but you also have to be sort of creative and innovative in how you think about this. While also asking people to perform.

their job and continue to do so. And maybe bringing it back to the product side, right? I mentioned before, sort of what is the evolution of how we define the product at MoVu. And obviously if you take the whole product, then you have this whole experience, if you look, sort of you zoom in again on the digital product, which is basically a form that we want people to come into and go all the way.

Jonathan (44:31.57)
with the data that we have and the experience that we have, you mentioned that we then call people, which is obviously what we do. Who do we call? Who do we call how often? Who do we maybe send an extra one or two emails to? Those are types of questions that I think we also solve with very challenging product work that’s also connected to maybe hard to quantify.

non-digital works on the phone or even sort of in person. But if we can do that, then again, we’re being quite, we’re optimizing the business model in a way that is, you know, it’s not about inventing new things, it’s about doing things better, but using tools and using data and using people’s experiences in the company.

in a not so straightforward way. So I think the challenge is quite a challenge.

Salva (45:31.673)
And at your size, to communicate really practically, right, this strategic direction you were mentioning, what are the best tools you’re using? I don’t know if you’re using OKRs or similar ways to direct a little bit like the work of the company. What is your suggestion there?

Jonathan (45:41.891)
Hmm.

Jonathan (45:49.026)
We do use OKRs and we use OKRs mainly to work on or to manage, communicate, and obviously track the work that I just described before. So this sort of work on constantly improving in the end the business model, right? Where we are very good and what I found to be really a wealth.

of data and KPIs is in the sort of the daily business. And I think that’s also a testament to previous leadership that the company from all the different roles, they understand the key metrics, they understand the KPIs, and understand them also in the sense of being interested in them and celebrating a good day, trying to find the reasons why we may have had a bad week, a bad month.

Jonathan (46:49.203)
And at that front, you know, there you’re working quite functionally, right? So you’re working on improving a script for a sales conversation. You might be doing an A-B test, which is quite specific. But when it comes to actually thinking, okay, what do we do next? And how do we provide additional services? You’re automatically talking about, okay, we need to market those. So we need to talk about them somewhere outside of the product. We need to actually include them in the product and maybe build them in.

and talk to our providers. And we obviously need to talk to them with our customers. So you immediately have the whole company working on something. And there, I think OKRs for us has been the best tool to set the objectives and then also to really make sure that whatever initiatives we take, whatever actions are proposed and are sort of agreed on and then implemented, that we make sure those are understandably leading.

to an improvement in whatever key result we’ve defined for that objective. So it’s something that I’ve seen work better and worse in some places. I feel strongly about how we use it at MoVu and that it works.

Salva (48:00.877)
What is your secret there? How often do you renew them or you update your OKRs for example? Is it quarterly based?

Jonathan (48:08.682)
We have quarterly OKRs that are sort of defined. We, what I don’t like is the idea of, you know, like obviously a quarter is an arbitrary unit of time. It can be quite long. It could also be quite short, right? So to set objectives, we’ve just done that, or like late last year, we set the objectives for this year. They correspond fairly well to some of the things that I’ve described today in terms of gaining market share, in terms of also…

providing more value for each user that comes to Movu, regardless of whether they book or not, et cetera. The key results, I would say in ideal world, we try to at least maintain a certain stability of the metric in question, while obviously the actual numbers that we want to achieve should grow. Depends a little bit on what we’re talking about. When it comes to initiatives and action items,

you know, those are the ones where I feel.

it’s better to be more flexible. So to put things on there, try them out, and also be honest when things are not working. So some of the things that I’ve seen in other companies, primarily larger ones, are sort of a commitment to sticking to what was defined in some sort of alignment meeting at the end of or at the beginning of a quarter that everybody then feels like this was discussed. It was obviously a tough discussion.

a frustrating one and we’re not going to change that even though everybody sees that it’s not working right so um i think the hard work of really defining what is the strategy and what does that mean for the kind of objectives we want coupled with um

Jonathan (49:59.474)
lots of flexibility in terms of actually the measures that we take and being honest about whether they’re working or not.

Salva (50:05.441)
And how do you set them? Is it something that you’re doing alone and every quarter you’re coming with this OKR, or at least part of it?

Jonathan (50:14.21)
So the objectives were set top down by the management team as part of the strategic communication for the goals of the year. The key results and initiatives are proposed and then discussed in a forum of team leads and team

Jonathan (50:43.99)
What we have changed quite recently is that we had sort of team OKRs, right? So these were…

Yeah, just added into team tabs for the different departments or functions that we have. And were because of what I mentioned before, and sort of how we use OKRs, they were always by necessity. I mean, not really one team owning or being responsible for the whole thing. And so as a, just to simplify things, we’ve sort of gotten rid of that. And so people propose, discuss, and then also agree on any.

key result, any initiatives that are relevant to the objectives that we have defined, regardless of which team has to actually work on it. That has helped a lot to really also bring the awareness of what we’re actually talking about here, which is not setting, taking your team goals, rewriting them into numerical results that you want to achieve, and then presenting them to others who then say, well, that’s your team. Good for you.

Salva (51:28.625)
Okay.

Jonathan (51:50.91)
you do it, but rather we’re talking about work that is, if we wanted to be successful and want to achieve our strategy, at the very least has to be discussed among different departments, different functions, and almost always has to also be actually worked on by people who are, you know, who have their own job and work in separate fields, but have to work together to do something like the example I mentioned before.

Salva (52:16.373)
And I think everybody wants to avoid, you’ve got a very nice product, it’s done, it’s prepared, but nobody spoke with marketing and they don’t know they left to launch at a certain point. And I want to be sure, sorry. I just want to be sure I understood correctly, because I think it’s very important. So you said you got rid of a part of it. So you got rid of the team part, of the objective for one given team, and you just went into transversal objectives.

Jonathan (52:22.29)
Yeah, exactly.

Jonathan (52:37.994)
Yeah, that’s right.

That’s right. So it’s a cross-functional key results and initiatives. I think the objectives were always team-wide. But we’ve sort of taken out even the possibility of proposing something that in the end basically is do your work that you’ve always done, but do it better or somehow, you know, or stretch the goals, right? That is certainly something we want. And it’s also there are other venues for us to talk about that, right? So we have a monthly

sort of deep dive into all these KPIs. And I’ve sort of scratched the surface of the complexity of what MoVu does. There’s also a number of other things that we do that are the products that in the end, it will take a good hour to go through all the KPIs just to know what happened last month. And obviously there’s a lot of work that comes out of that, right? So there’s not just, okay, these numbers were 5% lower than last month. They’re actually 3% behind last year.

Okay, good, next. So we also talk about that, but it’s a different process. It’s a process of improving operational excellence. And if out of that we realize that we need to actually maybe respond to the market in a certain way. So something that was good enough a year ago, two years ago might not be good enough today. Then obviously that turns into something that needs to be built, that needs to be

defined or implemented on any part of the business that will most likely also be cross-functional. So there’s a back and forth between measuring how good the business is doing and also thinking about the next step to further grow and optimize the business model.

Salva (54:27.793)
And so the how business is doing is your, let’s say, KPI kind of thing. So how do the hygiene part? So you should be doing your work kind of things basically and monitor it. And then the OKR, you just use them to build or to get new strategic directions.

Jonathan (54:32.397)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jonathan (54:41.746)
Yes. Yeah. And again, I mean, it’s a way, it’s a bit fluid, right, in between the two, because when I say new strategic directions, right, we’re not talking about building, you know, a dating platform for movers or expanding into, you know, going to North America. It is about, in the end, increasing, you know, stretching the funnel, again, providing more services, monetizing those better.

growing the funnel at the top by bringing new people. There’s all kinds of partnerships that we can do that sometimes require a bit of a rethink of how the whole process works. But I don’t think it has to be sexy to be exciting, right? It doesn’t have to be shiny and new. It can be an evolution of something that we do and still be complex enough that it needs to be measured. And also…

There’s, you know, I’ve named some ideas, there’s lots more. That means that, you know, so we also have to have a mechanism to really understand what is worth it, right? And luckily we have a situation where there’s a lot more ideas coming in from all the teams, which is something I’m super happy about, from all the teams to all the different departments and processes, then we actually meaningfully can execute, which allows us to have those kinds of discussions.

And at the same time, yes, our work is one of constant optimization and constantly checking that we’re doing the right thing, even within the sort of process and the offering that we have today. So we also have to have a way with regular sort of KPI reviews and then sort of deep diving into any issues we might find of making sure that the daily business, the day-to-day operating of the platform stays on track.

Salva (56:33.549)
I really like this part and I think it’s so powerful because this is really what goes and creates the bridge between any great idea, great strategic direction may have, and then the reality, which is happening in a team every day. I could be speaking about this for hours with you. I’ve got a last question, Jonathan, probably to bring this all together. We started our discussion talking about how you move from a product role into a general management and CEO role. We spoke about the business as a small role.

And you would, you know, what would tell you to the older you, like one hour, one year and a half or two years ago, in terms of looking at this with the eyes of somebody who’s managing the overall business, what is the role of product management and what do you would expect if you tell to the older you, oh, you should have done this differently or look at this from the perspective of the CEO or the perspective of the person managing this company, you really don’t get it. You know, this kind of things.

Jonathan (57:28.706)
Hmm.

Jonathan (57:34.274)
Many things. So on the one hand, I think, you know, I mean, I’ve always been aware, and I think mainly from listening to others who have had the experience, that it’s always more strategically complex than you think, right? Even if you deal with something that is by definition, sort of complex and strategic and multifaceted and cross-functional, you’re never seeing the full picture, right?

Um…

Jonathan (58:05.342)
And that is something that any product manager that might be listening to this, should keep in mind. And by similar token, your best practices, your frameworks, your processes, a good company, a company that is open to inputs from people who do work such as product work, will listen to you.

will want to hear what you have to say. But every company is obviously different. And I know this is something that’s been said on your podcast also before. The framework is the beginning of the discussion. Find the right match for what is good for your company. Be ready to compromise, but know when that compromise is maybe going too far for you personally, or maybe also for the success of the company. Speak out if that is the case.

because it’s really in applying the frameworks of product and sort of also teaching a company. I worked in the media industry, obviously an industry now that has been going through decades of transformation. Transformation is hard, right? And just like leading a product team, just like managing a product, it’s about finding the solution.

Jonathan (59:30.638)
There’s nothing really important to be gained by having been right, maybe, on the process, but not actually achieving anything.

Salva (59:39.333)
So more about the bottom than the front and the process is more about the actual business.

Jonathan (59:44.202)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in the end, I mean, if you come into it with a product point of view, and you really have that understanding of the customers and what the value is that you provide to them, and you know whether you’re succeeding at that or not, you know, you will know whether you’ve been successful, regardless of how you got there, right? And you can adapt what you do based on that, right? So that’s something that sometimes I feel we…

we can lose sight of because people start the conversation with product, or maybe against product very early on when it talks about how we do things. And all the different sides of this conversation need to come together to say, okay, well, how about we check the results in the end, right? Easier said than done oftentimes, but sometimes a way to sort of unblock these types of conversations.

that happened before the first line of code is written, before the first responsibility is defined and all that.

Salva (01:00:46.281)
I think you’re right. I mean, it looks obvious, right? I mean, if you… But I think you’ll have to re-listen to this part the last two minutes, two or three times to really get what you’re saying, which is extremely important, I think. And too often we overlook at this part and too often we are process over substance and we really forget where we are going. So I really enjoyed Jonathan’s discussion. He almost made me want to move again.

Jonathan (01:01:12.334)
Well, if you do, you know, you call me up, there’s a discount waiting for you Salva. But we do have some sort of, you know, some fairly old school tricks up our sleeve if we need to, yes.

Salva (01:01:17.585)
Excellent. I love discounts, you know.

Salva (01:01:26.698)
I love it. Jonathan, thank you very much. Where can people find you if they like to get in contact with you?

Jonathan (01:01:32.738)
You know on LinkedIn, I’m there. Also if you want to reach out to me via email, it’s Jonathan at movu.ch. For a short while I was one of two, but I’m back to being the only Jonathan in the company. And yeah, that’s mainly it.

Salva (01:01:51.013)
Thank you again, Jonathan. Thank you very much for being with us today.

Jonathan (01:01:54.07)
Thank you, Salva. It was a pleasure. Bye.

Salva (01:01:55.866)
Bye.